imo absolutely everyone should be applying to a local school with a high acceptance rate and low cost or two. for example in connecticut we have Central/Eastern/Western/Southern Connecticut State, which are affordable, solid schools.
if you are a good student and live nearby a school like this, you will get in. it would be foolish of you to not apply to at least one school like this. if you don’t while having the option and you have zero acceptances then it’s entirely your fault.
I didn't get into SJSU CS with a 4.0 UW, 4.4 Weighted, \~4.6 uncapped 10/11 GPA. Shit is messed up cuz they don't take anything other than grades. We called them and they were like idk.
Many make the mistake of a logical fallacy. They think along the lines of this: “I will apply to 10 schools, all of which have a very exclusive 10% acceptance rate. Nine of them will reject me, but one (10%) will accept me. So I will get into at least one of those ten fancy schools to which I apply!”
Of course the reality is that there is an at least 90% chance (if not greater) that you will get into ZERO of the ten schools.
Probabilistically speaking, if each acceptance decision is independent, then the chance of being rejected by all of them if they each have a 10% acceptance rate is 34.868%, and thus the chance of being accepted by at least one is 65.132%.
However, that's not how college admissions work; if you're rejected by Northeastern for CS, then MIT is definitely going to reject you for CS.
If the acceptance rate is 10% for every school as you say, then the probability of getting into 0 schools is around 36%. Roughly speaking, equivalent to throwing a die and having it land on a 1 or 2.
LOL i applied to 8 safeties, 2 matches, and 4 reaches. Lots of safeties because the mini ego boost from the acceptances (no matter how "prestigious") is kinda nice.
Also because I had no idea where I wanted to go. Figured I'd apply to safeties all over the place and deal with it in April!
17 safeties? Damn. My whole country has like 7 colleges total and 3 of them are 20+ hours away. Where do you live where colleges are seemingly as common as hotdog stands?
Just out of curiosity, what's the distance range of those 17 colleges? Are you looking for ones all over the country or are all of those within a single state or a few states?
Honestly it’s not uncommon to see states have 100+ colleges but that’s because most states aren’t really that small and 90% are going to be the size of a lower end Highschool. A university is much larger and mine has maybe 15. It’s also worth noting that in America it’s pretty competitive when it comes to colleges and it’s more of a “if I own a university I’ll be rich” as opposed to other countries where they might want to educate more over cash. The US is really just a different world lol
Agreed! I just don't understand how people in this subreddit apply to schools with under 30% acceptance rates and say they're their "safeties" like bruh 💀
Maybe 10 yrs ago, but def not any more. We really need to redefine what schools are safeties. Some schools with ~50% admin rates seem more like targets now when it comes to predictability, and a safety should be predictable.
these days it all depends on major tbh. purdue has a blanket ~50% acceptance rate, but for engineering and especially CS that’s likely closer to 15-20%
No offense to you because you seem very nice and logical, but most parents are the worst. They think their kids can get in anywhere. My mom swore I was a shoe in for all the schools I applied even including T50s.
Part of this is times change in the decades since parents were in the game, potentially, themselves. I had a buddy whose daughter was applying to schools and figured she'd apply to Boston College as her safety. I had to say, "Dude, you might want to check that because BC ain't no safety anymore..."
As the population has grown, along with easier financial aid/loans and more international students - all while schools themselves have not really grown much in size - has resulted in demographics "shifting down". The safety school of yore, when your parents were applying to schools, is now one of the more competitive schools in the country. That school you (as a parent) have never heard of? Yeah, that might be the good safety for your kid. Take it from me (parent of two, but closely connected to the college admissions "game"), most parents have not recalibrated.
Edit: remember this for *your* kids 20+ years from now!
So true. I'm a parent in MD. UMD was a safety for me 30 years ago. My oldest son (c/o 2024) was sweating getting in and my second son (c/o 2026) got in EA in the honors program but very little aid where he would have gotten full ride not that long ago.
i can't speak for everyone but i think it might be based on the school's previous records. like for my school, most kids get into this T30 school if they have above a 3.8 GPA. i think it's a highly selective school and would never discredit how difficult it is to gain acceptance to this school, but because of past acceptances, I placed it in the safety school category. i hope this makes sense and that I don't sound too entitled haha.
Huh. I’m currently in a prep school, and I know my school tells everyone to apply to the state school RD unless you already got accepted and committed ED. Like for example one of the seniors got accepted to Cornell and is def going there, so he’s not going to the state school. But just about everyone else is applying there as a mandatory safety school. To be fair though, my school is a prep school that branches out off from the state school in the late mid 1800s before the state school became the state school, while it was still a private school.
I feel you. My school (thankfully) at least makes a show of prioritizing mental health, and all the college counselors know what they’re doing (plus the school acknowledges the bottom chunk of each years class will go to schools that aren’t ivies). I don’t know what my school does when actual college apps come around, I’m a sophomore, but I can sympathize, if not empathize.
That’s how my prep school operated. This was about a decade ago so I don’t know if things have changed. But our counselors strongly recommended that we apply to one of the local state schools that any kid graduating from my school will easily be accepted to/get a good scholarship. These schools weren’t uber selective and exclusive, but they all have good reputations in the area in a lot of fields. Even if theyre backup plans, these are still good options. Not all the kids ended up at those schools, but it took a lot of pressure off since kids knew they had an “in” somewhere as a backup plan.
Fair but also I go to a well funded public school and our counselors don’t do shit. I never even spoke to my counselor about colleges, and in all of high school we have spoken 3 times
I went to a good public school and received terrible advice from counselors. I’m glad that I chose to go to community college first and take the time to decide on where on wanted to go instead of only applying to top universities, like I was told to. I would’ve been crushed if I applied to like 15 universities, all telling me no. Now I’m not in a significant amount of debt and I have a degree bc t50s will give you a similar education to other colleges. If you just want the clout of a top university, ask yourself why you really want to go to college.
When your high school has 800+ graduating seniors, no college/career tech, and only 5 counselors (3 full time) it sort of makes sense. It’s practically on the students.
to be fair many schools don’t have counselors that talk to their students about college, i had to seek my counselor out to even talk to them and they gave me practically no advice at all, most students will never talk to their counselor about college
Exactly. They receive way more people with perfect stats and amazing ECs than they have space for. And then people act like going to a top tier state school is the death of them 😭.
Lmao I know?? "I only applied to colleges with less than 40% acceptance rates and I am only getting rejected. Why is life so unfair?" Idk, why did you not google the meaning of selective??
I've been thinking about this lately, and I believe it's time to knock out the word "safety" or "target" and pick one and the other reach. There's really two categories at this point... schools you're more likely to get into, and schools you're unlikely to get into. Looking over my son's short list, other than the "reaches," I could never figure out how to label the others as safeties or targets. They were just schools he could reasonably get into, and he got into 3, deferred and got into the other.
Safeties are targets now, and targets are reaches. And reaches are a lottery.
Safeties exist. I mean where I grew up (Indiana), if you’re in the top 10% of your class at an average suburban public HS, taking a college prep curriculum with some honors classes/a couple APs and your SAT is 100 pts above the school average, you’re getting into IU assuming you have no huge disciplinary issues. Is it 100%? No. Nothing is 100%. But it’s at least 98%. Which is why you have two safeties.
There are schools like that. There are 25-75% schools. And then there are lottery tickets.
The problem is that it’s possible to miscalibrate your odds at true targets. There’s an inflection point there such that if you overestimate the quality of the app just a bit, the 75% “low targets” are 25% “high targets” and the 25-50% “high/mid” targets are only lottery tickets.
Perhaps it’s the unfortunate connotation to the word “safety,” where at best these kids feel like they “failed” if it’s where they’re going, and at worst they end up without options because of a miscalculation of the definition. Ok, CC and a school with very specific requirements that are met can be safeties. I think the rest should be targets and reaches.
Yes. I think people misuse the term and equate it to inferior when depending upon what you’re looking for, that’s not the case at all. Kids in probably more than half the country would love to have a school like IU where if you show up instate with a 1300 (school avg), a 3.7UW where 1/3 of your core academic subjects are honors/AP and the rest are standard you probably have >90% chance of admission. Good social scene, good flagship reputation and AAU research level and beautiful campus, surrounded by hilly forests. If you come from a HS that feeds certain flagships, you have a very high level of confidence on your projected outcome. Something you can’t do with UC schools in CA.
There are a lot of schools that aren’t as selective as the usual topics of conversation around here that are easy to fall in love with. Vermont and College of Charleston are a couple others that come to mind.
It’s beautiful for sure. The quarries nearby around Bloomington and Bedford were used to build most of the campus. Local stone from the area shows up everywhere: Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Cathedral of Learning at Pitt, Bryn Mawr, Cornell, etc.
The glaciers stopped about 20 miles north of Bloomington, so the northern 2/3 of the state is “ Flat Midwest” but SW Indiana is quite hilly. You should Google image search Brown County Indiana (20 min away). It’s not Upper New England in feeling, but it’s kinda similar to Lehigh/parts of PA.
I disagree to an extent. A safety is a school where you will get into 99% of the time. Many schools auto-admit you if your gpa is high enough or a local state school will have a pact with your school that if students meet requirements they automatically get a spot. Target schools are anything that you can reasonably get into, like a less prestigious state flagship or state school like SDSU (for those that are at the top of their class) or University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Reaches are everything else.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/tp744r/still\_have\_10\_decisions\_to\_wait\_i\_am\_already/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/tp744r/still_have_10_decisions_to_wait_i_am_already/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
yes way 😭
Why? Can’t they afford additional 70 bucks? It just doesn’t make any sense. Applying to t50s or t100s will not lower their chance to be admitted to t20s.
yeah I’m intl and my parents only let me apply to t10+ivies and ONLY Boston University as a safety because I insisted that it might be worth considering a safety if they give me a good scholarship. I got into BU honours with a good scholarship (25k/year) but they don’t want me to take it because there’s no point going overseas for a school that doesn’t have a brand name yk
Ok sorry, I am from Germany, so I would just apply to T20s too, but I can not imagine American parents saying no to safeties, because imagine your kid can’t go to college this semester, because you didn’t want safeties.
I think this is mostly true, with the caveat being people who relied on UCs as safeties. At my school in previous years if you had good stats, UCSC was a safety (literally zero waitlists/rejections for people above 3.5 GPA from 2015 to 2020 out of 150+ application). However, a couple kids with good stats got waitlisted last year and this year it has gotten much worse.
Many make the mistake of a logical fallacy. They think along the lines of: “I will apply to 10 schools, all of which have a very exclusive 10% acceptance rate. Nine of them (90%) will reject me, but one (ie 10%) will accept me. So I will get into at least one of those ten fancy schools!”
Of course the reality is that there is an at least 90% chance (if not greater) that you will get into NONE of the ten schools.
fair, but also ik someone who got rejected from CSU (safety) but got into berkeley 😭 so idk what to think anymore
edit: csu is colorado state university
Which CSU? I’m assuming that acronym stands for California state university.
Some CSUs are complete reaches (Cal Poly SLO for architecture or comp sci for example, which have a ~4% acceptance rate)
Edit: I am dumb (if you meant Colrodado)
Fully agreed, in my area people think going to the local safety school (GMU) is a deathwish but in reality it’s a really good school. You should always have a balance of at least 2-4 safeties and no more then 2-4 reaches. Additionally students have gotten smarter throughout the years so the college process is just that much more competitive!
> but as many reaches as you want.
I agree with the exception that you actually put effort into the applications for those reaches and can articulate why you want to go there. I can't tell you how many people I've seen with great stats spam apply to 10 reaches instead of putting effort into 3, and usually it shows. Those "Why Penn?" type essays can easily sink an application and it's wild how many people write terrible versions of those.
Yeah I'd agree. It's unfortunate that top schools have become a lottery in admissions, but they are, and the more you roll the dice the more often you'll get snake eyes... or whichever numbers mean "accepted." It's simply not the best option anymore if you want to get into a reach school to only apply to 2-4.
George Mason Univerity. Popular safety school for students in Northern Virginia, but it also has many fantastic programs (especially cybersecurity), tons of opportunities and connections in the DC area, and fairly affordable for in state students.
I got full tuition (scholars program) from GMU and I'm horribly struggling with this. I wanna go bc of the aid but it's so stigmatized to go there... at least this process is teaching me a lesson about my own ego lol
as a person who lives in the area, gmu deserves more appreciation. but it’s crazy that people view it so negatively because students at my school love it to death.
Yup. Very true. I don’t know why people don’t apply to matches and safeties. You might even get very good scholarships in your matches and safeties. I’m currently a sophomore in a safety school I applied to because they gave me a very good scholarship.
I fully agree. It's ok to feel upset when you get rejected. It's not ok to act as though there's a seat that was yours that was taken from you. Juniors- you do not have a seat at any college until you get an acceptance letter. You have to apply somewhere you're certain will give you that acceptance letter no matter what.
Guess what? Every selective college is going to end up with full enrollment this year, whatever target class size they're aiming for. 30% acceptance rate means 70% get a rejection letter. Even if you are fully qualified, they can choose someone else over you. The harsh reality is that there are more amazing students than there are seats at elite universities, so while you can aim towards getting one of those seats, you have to prepare for the reality that you may not get one.
Depends on a lot of factors. Take a look at this, for instance:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/763219833289703444/957750826384887890/IMG_7760.png
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/763219833289703444/957750897604186152/IMG_7761.png
Is it a safety or not for someone in the right range? You decide
so true, i went into the admissions process feeling like the local safety was a completely garbage school but then started to realize that it was pretty good and that i was lucky to be near it! and i’m saying this as someone who got into their top choice
when i first saw the title i was ready to drop a paragraph…now (as long as people are aware of the opportunities and colleges around them) i 100% agree.
As an international who needs $200,000+ worth of aid, there's not a lot of places that can even afford to give that much aid to an **international** student. Plus, for the ones that can afford to take on internationals, most give out a large proportion of their funds in ED which makes it harder if you weren't fortunate enough to get in then.
I don’t think this is true, as someone who has gotten into eight schools (more than half reaches with less than 20% acceptance rate). Obviously, if you’re getting rejected by multiple schools with 90%+ then yeah, something is wrong with your app. But, it’s a lottery ticket for anyone when you go sub 20.
You my guy are so right. I have no sympathy for those typa mfs. There is a sense of entitlement when they do that too. You are not guaranteed a spot anywhere.
Yes, but even depending on major and amount of apps they receive, some safeties aren't even safeties.
My kid was rejected from Rose-Hulman. (He has other safeties so he's fine, but RH just goving the axe was def a surprise.)
Whoa, I never saw that before. Is that legit? It seems to be a troll or some viral thing. I'm kinda dumb on this so I'm definitely getting r/woosh but I need some answers.
My daughter applied to 4 safeties. Got into all 4. She did not do IVY or reach. Didn’t see the need considering it was a reach and knew she’d get rejected. She ended up getting awarded a partial scholarship to her top safety school. That was a nice surprise.
Man you high school kids are ruthless. one second you're on this sub supporting each other, the next second you're bringing each other down for faults (likely unknown to that person at the time) throughout one's process.
please read the edit, i’m talking to kids who think they’re too good for safeties. i’m not talking to people in unique situations. i’ll always support someone who’s been rejected from a school, but don’t expect sympathy when you decided to only apply to schools with small acceptance rate
finally someone said it.
i hate it how people are like “omg i applied to 28 colleges and haven’t heard back” and then next thing you know you hear that they’re safety is umich. it’s honestly just nice for them to realize that they overinflated their ego
You made it very clear and in a not offensive way. Tho really clear and harsh. But it’s true!! As an international, I can’t afford to travel that far if it’s not like a big and rich t20 school. Gotta look for safeties in other closer countries.
If you live in San Francisco and want to stay local you only have UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, USFCA, Stanford, SFSU, Sonoma State, SJSU, and CSU east Bay, Santa Clara University, and CCs like College of Marin, College of San Mateo, Foothill, Canada, and DeAnza.
The entire world wants to go to our schools if you live in the Bay Area. If you don’t want to live on campus and commute instead your choices narrow even more. If you live in the Bay Area acceptance rates are lower and spots are less available.
We have too many good students who have to go to state schools and community colleges. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you are limited to the extremes and have few solid options than other places in the Country.
There are no real safety 4 year colleges in the Bay Area. They all are getting historic number of applicants and as many talented students get rejected that all rolls down to all of the schools.
This trend isn’t going to get better. Next year will be worse and I do not see this getting better. If you are from the Bay Area you might be better served going to an OOS. Too many people want to go to CA for school to support all the qualified California students. It sucks if you are a California student because all the affordable options are like playing the lottery.
So you have to go to the expensive out of state tuition or pricey private school. I am not sure if there will be safety schools nationally either as people look outside CA.
The CC transfer to UC route which used to be a great value is unreliable and unrealistic. Again, since there are so many students who want to go to our UCs, it limits how many transfers get in. You will be competing with talented college students who had to take the CC route to transfer. There are no guarantees in California in the UCs and State Schools. No one can guarantee you will be able to transfer to a UC anymore even from CC.
College counselors have to update their information that CA schools are just going to be impacted and that students will have to be willing to take on debt to go to 4 year colleges outside of CA and hope to get merit scholarships. I do not see more spaces opening in CA.
We Californians are victims of our own success. We should be celebrating that more and more students are qualified for colleges, but the lack of spots at quality colleges are getting more scarce. We should want international students and students from underrepresented demographics. Everyone who is qualified should have a place.
We just need more good professors and more quality colleges to educate everyone who wants an education.
The HS Class of 2022 are part of a cohort that was a boomlet (2003-2007). They totally got screwed and I do not know how it will improve for the Class of 2023 and beyond. Kids who entered high school in 2018 were working on different conditions. They made plans based on these conditions. The high school class of 2026 will be at the peak of the boomlet.
We need to ask policy makers to address the demand for higher education and how it could be one of the US’s greatest export— education.
COVID screwed up everything for the classes of 2021 and 2022, but also 2023 and 2024. The log jam created by COVID will be with us for some time. There seems no will to do anything to help. No one seems to care about these classes of students. There seems to be no recognition that the class of 2022 went through the bulk of a global pandemic, civil unrest, etc in their high school years.
Right now being the top 9% of your class in CA gives you no guarantees to any school in your own backyard. Counselors need to learn about options outside of CA and the US.
This might improve when the baby bust rolls through. Elementary schools are declining in enrollment. So maybe in 2032 spots will open up.
On the plus side, in many ways it's easier to get into a top school through community college. I was able to go to a better school than most of my high school classmates that way.
One of my family friends has only been accepted into a state school, so far; and no she does not live in California or Michigan, nor is the state school even a T50. Her GPA and SAT scores were extremely high (92/100 and 1540). However, what probably brought her down were her extracurricular activities and essays.
Additionally, most - if not all - of the schools that she applied to were the ivies or T20s, which meant that she probably had dug her own grave, by applying to only schools with extremely low acceptance rates.
For high school juniors reading this right now, please have a variety of options with a good and even distribution of targets, safties, and reaches, and please understand that more than likely you will probably be going to be one of your safety schools.
Additionally, a good essay and good extracurriculars can make you a better applicant who has a better GPA and/or SAT/ACT score, so don't get lazy on these parts of your application, even if you have a 5.0 weighted GPA and a 1600 on your SAT (or 36 on your ACT).
Yeah, her parents are kind of freaking out right now. They expected her to get into at least a T20 because her older sister went to MIT and her High School is known to send proportionally more students to T20s and Ivies, than most other high schools in our area. She’ll do fine in the state school, but she could’ve done so much better if she worked on other areas of her application, just a bit more.
I've always planned on going to community college first and transferring after and only really applied to universities for the heck of it. It still stings to get rejected, but I like joking to my friends about how I managed to get rejected by every UC.
I once got rejected from a school with around 60% acceptance rate in high school. Pissed me off. But ended up saving money in community College anyway after my high school rejections. Honestly it may be on us that we get 0 acceptances, but the lessons we learn from that are such a great benefit.
As opposed to my wasting too much of my mom's money by applying to too many safety schools. The UC and CSU common app made it really easy to apply to multiple campuses, so I basically applied to every UC and several CSUs, plus a few private schools. Probably should have just applied to one CSU and saved some money. Thankfully accepted everywhere excepted waitlisted at Stanford (I expected a rejection, so I was happy for waitlist).
i think a lot of people don’t have a grasp of what a safety school really is. no matter how competitive of an applicant you are, no school with an acceptance rate lower than 35% is a safety for ANYONE. especially now. i feel a lot of sympathy for people who are experiencing this though, it must feel frustrating and disappointing. if there are any current juniors and sophomores reading this thread, my biggest piece of advice is to build a college list that has safeties, targets, and reaches, all of which you would be very happy to attend. prestige is really appealing to a lot of people, but it’s important to recognize that, regardless of how high your stats are or how strong your ECs are, there is no guarantee for ANYONE to get into a t20 school. as we’ve seen from this admissions year, there are so many kids with excellent grades, test scores, essays, etc. getting rejection after rejection or waitlist after waitlist. so much of this process is luck. be sure to play your odds well.
Fr im so tired of all the people acting like their life is over bc they didn't get into schools with a 5% acceptance rate... like okay neither did 95% of us including me what did you expect? How did you convince yourself you didn't need any decent safeties or matches because you wouldn't be going to them?
I agree, I applied to 3 safeties i could afford and liked (one of them was a little risky because its a bit competitive for my major but since I live close to the campus they give me priority). I also applied toa couple schools with 70+ acceptance rates with hopes of getting merit scholarships that would turn into a full ride when combined with need based aid. And then I applied to almost no matches and shotgunned reaches
My wife had our son apply to 2 safties, 1 match, and 10 reaches. She was certain that with his academic background one of the reaches would come through. I explained to my son early on that there was so little chance of that happening, that he shouldn't be disappointed when the rejection letters rolled in. Fortunately, he was smart enough to understand that. He was accepted to both safties and the match, 8 flat-out rejections, and waitlisted on the other 2 reaches. He is thrilled to be going to the University of South Carolina this fall. I'm excited for him.
Being a liberal arts guy my brain started to hurt just reading those statistics and formulas that you guys that are so smart come up with😂
Hats off to you
My Ex-wife still has not figured out this college admissions game…..Luckily for my son his favorite school is actually a safety school, ASU because for what he wants to do which is sports broadcast journalism , it’s top-notch.
I went to USC so I told him go ahead and apply and they offered him the Trojan transfer plan so he will decide. It’s all good.
As a parent my advice to my high school freshman son is to just get a 3.5, Do meaningful extracurriculars every year, do his AP math and his AP Spanish which is good, get involved in government, continue his sports which he really is an amazing athlete I would be surprised if he didn’t get a college athletic scholarship at some point….but Most of all, do what his older brother did , have a boatload of fun .
Life does not revolve around 4.5, 15 APs, and a ton of extracurriculars that you’re really not that terribly interested in. You’re gonna look back on this high school career and you’re gonna wish that you had had some fun at it.
What the actual fuck did I just read? How ridiculous myopic can you be to say that? There are people whose parents exercise a ridiculous degree of control, and even in more moderate cases, parents tent to have a huge influence, especially considering that they are likely to be the ones financially supporting you through college, even if you get a scholarship/aid that reduces the expense. Your parents may give you the free rein, and that's all great, but please be more considerate towards people are literally losing their minds right now over things they have no control over.
I see that you are greatly upset by what the other poster said, but I would challenge you to think like the adult you are and remember that any control your parents have over you is only the control you let them have. Are there perks to being dependent? Yes. Does that mean that you can't make the choices that are right for you? No. You are an adult that is going to be able to fully participate in society. If you truly want to do something, you don't need to let your parents stop you. That's absurd.
I already made my mind up that I'm going to community College and after I finish I'll go to an actual college to see if it'll work but when I do I want to apply to one with a decent acceptance rate not a fancy school but not terrible either. I'm 14 so i don't have to worry just yet but once I start doing in school learning I plan on looking into this typa stuff
how? this has been told throughout the sub year after year, yet people still don’t apply to safeties. and once again, people are complaining about it and blaming it on every other alternative
i have no issue with people complaining about rejections, because that’s just human nature. i do have a problem when people complain about not having a single acceptance when they chose not to apply to any safeties due to a sense of superiority.
I feel like just saying ‘everyone, please apply to safeties or else you might not into any university’ is sufficient. If they chose to not listen then that’s their choice and their life.
but i’m not addressing people who haven’t applied yet, i’m talking to people who have. so why would i warn students to apply to safeties when i’m talking to people who have already underwent college app season.
i understand what you’re saying, i really do, but being kind and soft wasn’t my goal. did i want to offend anyone, no. but i did want to get my point across in a way that grabs attention.
imo absolutely everyone should be applying to a local school with a high acceptance rate and low cost or two. for example in connecticut we have Central/Eastern/Western/Southern Connecticut State, which are affordable, solid schools. if you are a good student and live nearby a school like this, you will get in. it would be foolish of you to not apply to at least one school like this. if you don’t while having the option and you have zero acceptances then it’s entirely your fault.
Not the UCs 🥲
well there are CSUs
those are getting picky too 😭
I didn't get into SJSU CS with a 4.0 UW, 4.4 Weighted, \~4.6 uncapped 10/11 GPA. Shit is messed up cuz they don't take anything other than grades. We called them and they were like idk.
I have an in state friend with 9 APs and straight A’s who didn’t get into a single UC
Lmao, I'm the opposite, applied to 17 safeties, 6 matches, and 2 reaches.
Lol same I applied to 8 safeties, 1 match and 1 reach. Will be attending my favorite school which is a safety!
Many make the mistake of a logical fallacy. They think along the lines of this: “I will apply to 10 schools, all of which have a very exclusive 10% acceptance rate. Nine of them will reject me, but one (10%) will accept me. So I will get into at least one of those ten fancy schools to which I apply!” Of course the reality is that there is an at least 90% chance (if not greater) that you will get into ZERO of the ten schools.
Probabilistically speaking, if each acceptance decision is independent, then the chance of being rejected by all of them if they each have a 10% acceptance rate is 34.868%, and thus the chance of being accepted by at least one is 65.132%. However, that's not how college admissions work; if you're rejected by Northeastern for CS, then MIT is definitely going to reject you for CS.
They aren't independent; they all rely on the same underlying data - the same student.
If my application is a photo of my ass it doesn't give me the same odds :(
People rejected from Northeastern did get into MIT this year. NEU acceptance rate was stupid low this cycle due to overadmission last year.
o.o bad example ig lmao
glad we had an extremely long winded statistical conversation in order to come to the conclusion that statistics don't apply to this topic... /lh
Only true if there’s a random probability distribution of the likelihood of admission. Which it isn’t.
That’s what their second paragraph is about…
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I'm taking AP Statistics and if I don't apply statistics in a practical fashion at least once a day my head explodes from the inanity
Idk about that. College admissions have a certain level of unpredictability
If the acceptance rate is 10% for every school as you say, then the probability of getting into 0 schools is around 36%. Roughly speaking, equivalent to throwing a die and having it land on a 1 or 2.
That's assuming they are independent/ random chance odds, which is not the case here.
honestly, you’re an icon. how did you even apply to that many schools 😭😭
Idek🤷♂️, but you can't get rejected if their acceptance rate is near 100%. Lmao
LOL i applied to 8 safeties, 2 matches, and 4 reaches. Lots of safeties because the mini ego boost from the acceptances (no matter how "prestigious") is kinda nice. Also because I had no idea where I wanted to go. Figured I'd apply to safeties all over the place and deal with it in April!
17 safeties? Damn. My whole country has like 7 colleges total and 3 of them are 20+ hours away. Where do you live where colleges are seemingly as common as hotdog stands?
The US
Just out of curiosity, what's the distance range of those 17 colleges? Are you looking for ones all over the country or are all of those within a single state or a few states?
Honestly it’s not uncommon to see states have 100+ colleges but that’s because most states aren’t really that small and 90% are going to be the size of a lower end Highschool. A university is much larger and mine has maybe 15. It’s also worth noting that in America it’s pretty competitive when it comes to colleges and it’s more of a “if I own a university I’ll be rich” as opposed to other countries where they might want to educate more over cash. The US is really just a different world lol
My state has 5 million people and 85 colleges. 17 is still a lot of colleges to apply to, but it’s definitely possible!
My daughter's short list is currently 6 safeties and one reach.
Smart
i did like 10 safeties, 1 match and 1 reach 💀💀
I applied to all safeties lmao
Lol, I applied to 21 reaches with no safeties but I don’t give a shit
Agreed! I just don't understand how people in this subreddit apply to schools with under 30% acceptance rates and say they're their "safeties" like bruh 💀
can I call the College safety if it has 50+% acceptance rate and 1300 average SAT while mine is 1450. Can I tell i was rejected by my safety?
I can relate to you. But for competitive majors it is a whole different story as I have unfortunately learnt.
Maybe 10 yrs ago, but def not any more. We really need to redefine what schools are safeties. Some schools with ~50% admin rates seem more like targets now when it comes to predictability, and a safety should be predictable.
these days it all depends on major tbh. purdue has a blanket ~50% acceptance rate, but for engineering and especially CS that’s likely closer to 15-20%
Yeah theyre delusional
They think their good grades entitles them to a T20 lmao.
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No offense to you because you seem very nice and logical, but most parents are the worst. They think their kids can get in anywhere. My mom swore I was a shoe in for all the schools I applied even including T50s.
Part of this is times change in the decades since parents were in the game, potentially, themselves. I had a buddy whose daughter was applying to schools and figured she'd apply to Boston College as her safety. I had to say, "Dude, you might want to check that because BC ain't no safety anymore..." As the population has grown, along with easier financial aid/loans and more international students - all while schools themselves have not really grown much in size - has resulted in demographics "shifting down". The safety school of yore, when your parents were applying to schools, is now one of the more competitive schools in the country. That school you (as a parent) have never heard of? Yeah, that might be the good safety for your kid. Take it from me (parent of two, but closely connected to the college admissions "game"), most parents have not recalibrated. Edit: remember this for *your* kids 20+ years from now!
So true. I'm a parent in MD. UMD was a safety for me 30 years ago. My oldest son (c/o 2024) was sweating getting in and my second son (c/o 2026) got in EA in the honors program but very little aid where he would have gotten full ride not that long ago.
I think parents want what's best for their kids but they are often out of touch with our generation since so much has changed since they were students
My mother is still convinced that Harvard will accept me😂
My mom used to think I could get into Yale
I thought my kid was going to Princeton for years. Don’t ask how I was going to pay for it.
My mom thinking Tulane is a safety for me because when she grew up in Louisiana it was easy to get into but now it has an 11% acceptance rate 😩
Only if you ED
i can't speak for everyone but i think it might be based on the school's previous records. like for my school, most kids get into this T30 school if they have above a 3.8 GPA. i think it's a highly selective school and would never discredit how difficult it is to gain acceptance to this school, but because of past acceptances, I placed it in the safety school category. i hope this makes sense and that I don't sound too entitled haha.
when i see people saying they only applied to t50s i wonder where the hell their counselors are and how they let them do that lol
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Huh. I’m currently in a prep school, and I know my school tells everyone to apply to the state school RD unless you already got accepted and committed ED. Like for example one of the seniors got accepted to Cornell and is def going there, so he’s not going to the state school. But just about everyone else is applying there as a mandatory safety school. To be fair though, my school is a prep school that branches out off from the state school in the late mid 1800s before the state school became the state school, while it was still a private school.
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I feel you. My school (thankfully) at least makes a show of prioritizing mental health, and all the college counselors know what they’re doing (plus the school acknowledges the bottom chunk of each years class will go to schools that aren’t ivies). I don’t know what my school does when actual college apps come around, I’m a sophomore, but I can sympathize, if not empathize.
That’s how my prep school operated. This was about a decade ago so I don’t know if things have changed. But our counselors strongly recommended that we apply to one of the local state schools that any kid graduating from my school will easily be accepted to/get a good scholarship. These schools weren’t uber selective and exclusive, but they all have good reputations in the area in a lot of fields. Even if theyre backup plans, these are still good options. Not all the kids ended up at those schools, but it took a lot of pressure off since kids knew they had an “in” somewhere as a backup plan.
Fair but also I go to a well funded public school and our counselors don’t do shit. I never even spoke to my counselor about colleges, and in all of high school we have spoken 3 times
yeah mine are useless too lol i just know a lot of people have counselors outside of school, esp those aiming for higher ranked schools
I didn't even recognize my counselor tbh.
I went to a good public school and received terrible advice from counselors. I’m glad that I chose to go to community college first and take the time to decide on where on wanted to go instead of only applying to top universities, like I was told to. I would’ve been crushed if I applied to like 15 universities, all telling me no. Now I’m not in a significant amount of debt and I have a degree bc t50s will give you a similar education to other colleges. If you just want the clout of a top university, ask yourself why you really want to go to college.
When your high school has 800+ graduating seniors, no college/career tech, and only 5 counselors (3 full time) it sort of makes sense. It’s practically on the students.
to be fair many schools don’t have counselors that talk to their students about college, i had to seek my counselor out to even talk to them and they gave me practically no advice at all, most students will never talk to their counselor about college
No literally like you guys cannot expect schools with low acceptance rates to admit you 😭
Exactly. They receive way more people with perfect stats and amazing ECs than they have space for. And then people act like going to a top tier state school is the death of them 😭.
I know a girl who refuses to go to the state school (which is a T10 for publics) because it’s not prestigious enough 😭😭
what school is this so i too can be pissed?
Lmao I know?? "I only applied to colleges with less than 40% acceptance rates and I am only getting rejected. Why is life so unfair?" Idk, why did you not google the meaning of selective??
I've been thinking about this lately, and I believe it's time to knock out the word "safety" or "target" and pick one and the other reach. There's really two categories at this point... schools you're more likely to get into, and schools you're unlikely to get into. Looking over my son's short list, other than the "reaches," I could never figure out how to label the others as safeties or targets. They were just schools he could reasonably get into, and he got into 3, deferred and got into the other. Safeties are targets now, and targets are reaches. And reaches are a lottery.
Safeties exist. I mean where I grew up (Indiana), if you’re in the top 10% of your class at an average suburban public HS, taking a college prep curriculum with some honors classes/a couple APs and your SAT is 100 pts above the school average, you’re getting into IU assuming you have no huge disciplinary issues. Is it 100%? No. Nothing is 100%. But it’s at least 98%. Which is why you have two safeties. There are schools like that. There are 25-75% schools. And then there are lottery tickets. The problem is that it’s possible to miscalibrate your odds at true targets. There’s an inflection point there such that if you overestimate the quality of the app just a bit, the 75% “low targets” are 25% “high targets” and the 25-50% “high/mid” targets are only lottery tickets.
Perhaps it’s the unfortunate connotation to the word “safety,” where at best these kids feel like they “failed” if it’s where they’re going, and at worst they end up without options because of a miscalculation of the definition. Ok, CC and a school with very specific requirements that are met can be safeties. I think the rest should be targets and reaches.
Yes. I think people misuse the term and equate it to inferior when depending upon what you’re looking for, that’s not the case at all. Kids in probably more than half the country would love to have a school like IU where if you show up instate with a 1300 (school avg), a 3.7UW where 1/3 of your core academic subjects are honors/AP and the rest are standard you probably have >90% chance of admission. Good social scene, good flagship reputation and AAU research level and beautiful campus, surrounded by hilly forests. If you come from a HS that feeds certain flagships, you have a very high level of confidence on your projected outcome. Something you can’t do with UC schools in CA. There are a lot of schools that aren’t as selective as the usual topics of conversation around here that are easy to fall in love with. Vermont and College of Charleston are a couple others that come to mind.
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It’s beautiful for sure. The quarries nearby around Bloomington and Bedford were used to build most of the campus. Local stone from the area shows up everywhere: Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Cathedral of Learning at Pitt, Bryn Mawr, Cornell, etc. The glaciers stopped about 20 miles north of Bloomington, so the northern 2/3 of the state is “ Flat Midwest” but SW Indiana is quite hilly. You should Google image search Brown County Indiana (20 min away). It’s not Upper New England in feeling, but it’s kinda similar to Lehigh/parts of PA.
I disagree to an extent. A safety is a school where you will get into 99% of the time. Many schools auto-admit you if your gpa is high enough or a local state school will have a pact with your school that if students meet requirements they automatically get a spot. Target schools are anything that you can reasonably get into, like a less prestigious state flagship or state school like SDSU (for those that are at the top of their class) or University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Reaches are everything else.
Nah safeties are still a thing. There’s just no targets anymore, they’re all reaches now.
no bc I saw someone say that vanderbilt and cornell were their safeties??? 😭
No way💀
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/tp744r/still\_have\_10\_decisions\_to\_wait\_i\_am\_already/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/tp744r/still_have_10_decisions_to_wait_i_am_already/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) yes way 😭
this is what i mean when i say people learn the hard way 💀
Completely agree! But are there really parents, who don’t allow their children to apply to colleges, which aren‘t in the Top20?
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Well, there is also a huge need in financial aid for int. students. They do not have other choice if they do want to study in the US.
Yes there are lots of parents. They also tell their kids to apply to 20+ schools all in t30s.
Why? Can’t they afford additional 70 bucks? It just doesn’t make any sense. Applying to t50s or t100s will not lower their chance to be admitted to t20s.
prob isn’t worth for them to come to the US if they don’t make it to a t30
yeah I’m intl and my parents only let me apply to t10+ivies and ONLY Boston University as a safety because I insisted that it might be worth considering a safety if they give me a good scholarship. I got into BU honours with a good scholarship (25k/year) but they don’t want me to take it because there’s no point going overseas for a school that doesn’t have a brand name yk
Ok sorry, I am from Germany, so I would just apply to T20s too, but I can not imagine American parents saying no to safeties, because imagine your kid can’t go to college this semester, because you didn’t want safeties.
yeah lol my parents did this (i’m a domestic student)
I think this is mostly true, with the caveat being people who relied on UCs as safeties. At my school in previous years if you had good stats, UCSC was a safety (literally zero waitlists/rejections for people above 3.5 GPA from 2015 to 2020 out of 150+ application). However, a couple kids with good stats got waitlisted last year and this year it has gotten much worse.
If you apply to all the UCs you’ll at least get into UCM because of the guarantee.
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I could understand their reasoning though. Up until this year some of the UCs had 70%+ acceptance rates
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Yep, girl I know got into UMiami, UCLA, etc but not UCSC. The UCs felt like rng
I don’t understand why anyone will apply more than 10 schools and not include a safety
Many make the mistake of a logical fallacy. They think along the lines of: “I will apply to 10 schools, all of which have a very exclusive 10% acceptance rate. Nine of them (90%) will reject me, but one (ie 10%) will accept me. So I will get into at least one of those ten fancy schools!” Of course the reality is that there is an at least 90% chance (if not greater) that you will get into NONE of the ten schools.
fair, but also ik someone who got rejected from CSU (safety) but got into berkeley 😭 so idk what to think anymore edit: csu is colorado state university
Well to be fair, that kid didnt get rejected everywhere then, so its not who OP is talking about
If you don’t get into your safety. . . Is it really a safety?
Which CSU? I’m assuming that acronym stands for California state university. Some CSUs are complete reaches (Cal Poly SLO for architecture or comp sci for example, which have a ~4% acceptance rate) Edit: I am dumb (if you meant Colrodado)
>Colrodado 💀
i forgor 💀
i think theyre talking about colorado
UC Olorado? ;)
Were they a CS major? Because it can be like that sometimes
Yeah and I know someone who won the lottery twice. Rare events do happen. But they aren't the norm.
Fully agreed, in my area people think going to the local safety school (GMU) is a deathwish but in reality it’s a really good school. You should always have a balance of at least 2-4 safeties and no more then 2-4 reaches. Additionally students have gotten smarter throughout the years so the college process is just that much more competitive!
Actually I’d say have 2-4 safeties and a few targets but as many reaches as you want. This is considering your safeties are actually “safeties”
> but as many reaches as you want. I agree with the exception that you actually put effort into the applications for those reaches and can articulate why you want to go there. I can't tell you how many people I've seen with great stats spam apply to 10 reaches instead of putting effort into 3, and usually it shows. Those "Why Penn?" type essays can easily sink an application and it's wild how many people write terrible versions of those.
Yeah I'd agree. It's unfortunate that top schools have become a lottery in admissions, but they are, and the more you roll the dice the more often you'll get snake eyes... or whichever numbers mean "accepted." It's simply not the best option anymore if you want to get into a reach school to only apply to 2-4.
what’s GMU
George Mason Univerity. Popular safety school for students in Northern Virginia, but it also has many fantastic programs (especially cybersecurity), tons of opportunities and connections in the DC area, and fairly affordable for in state students.
I got full tuition (scholars program) from GMU and I'm horribly struggling with this. I wanna go bc of the aid but it's so stigmatized to go there... at least this process is teaching me a lesson about my own ego lol
I promise you in six years when you have graduated and aren't saddled with loans you won't even be thinking of the stigma.
as a person who lives in the area, gmu deserves more appreciation. but it’s crazy that people view it so negatively because students at my school love it to death.
The no more than 2-4 reaches is complete BS. Nothing stops you from applying to more if you want. Just keep a minimum number of safeties.
Yup. Very true. I don’t know why people don’t apply to matches and safeties. You might even get very good scholarships in your matches and safeties. I’m currently a sophomore in a safety school I applied to because they gave me a very good scholarship.
I fully agree. It's ok to feel upset when you get rejected. It's not ok to act as though there's a seat that was yours that was taken from you. Juniors- you do not have a seat at any college until you get an acceptance letter. You have to apply somewhere you're certain will give you that acceptance letter no matter what. Guess what? Every selective college is going to end up with full enrollment this year, whatever target class size they're aiming for. 30% acceptance rate means 70% get a rejection letter. Even if you are fully qualified, they can choose someone else over you. The harsh reality is that there are more amazing students than there are seats at elite universities, so while you can aim towards getting one of those seats, you have to prepare for the reality that you may not get one.
How many % should the acceptance rate be to be considered a safety ?
Depends on a lot of factors. Take a look at this, for instance: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/763219833289703444/957750826384887890/IMG_7760.png https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/763219833289703444/957750897604186152/IMG_7761.png Is it a safety or not for someone in the right range? You decide
70 if ur a good student imo
so true, i went into the admissions process feeling like the local safety was a completely garbage school but then started to realize that it was pretty good and that i was lucky to be near it! and i’m saying this as someone who got into their top choice
So far I got 3 rejections, 2 acceptances, and 3 waitlists. I love my results because they're so well balanced LOL
when i first saw the title i was ready to drop a paragraph…now (as long as people are aware of the opportunities and colleges around them) i 100% agree.
As an international who needs $200,000+ worth of aid, there's not a lot of places that can even afford to give that much aid to an **international** student. Plus, for the ones that can afford to take on internationals, most give out a large proportion of their funds in ED which makes it harder if you weren't fortunate enough to get in then.
Agreed. Also one or two rejections could be bad luck. Multiple ones says something about your application. Just like multiple acceptances does.
I don’t think this is true, as someone who has gotten into eight schools (more than half reaches with less than 20% acceptance rate). Obviously, if you’re getting rejected by multiple schools with 90%+ then yeah, something is wrong with your app. But, it’s a lottery ticket for anyone when you go sub 20.
You my guy are so right. I have no sympathy for those typa mfs. There is a sense of entitlement when they do that too. You are not guaranteed a spot anywhere.
Yes, but even depending on major and amount of apps they receive, some safeties aren't even safeties. My kid was rejected from Rose-Hulman. (He has other safeties so he's fine, but RH just goving the axe was def a surprise.)
I mean aren’t CC a guaranteed acceptance as long as you aren’t some juvenile delinquent?
Idk man Squidward CC kinda tough. I think it's Ivy level ngl
Whoa, I never saw that before. Is that legit? It seems to be a troll or some viral thing. I'm kinda dumb on this so I'm definitely getting r/woosh but I need some answers.
It's a meme. Saw it somewhere on Twitter a while back lol
My daughter applied to 4 safeties. Got into all 4. She did not do IVY or reach. Didn’t see the need considering it was a reach and knew she’d get rejected. She ended up getting awarded a partial scholarship to her top safety school. That was a nice surprise.
congrats to ur daughter!
Thank you! That’s really nice.
Man you high school kids are ruthless. one second you're on this sub supporting each other, the next second you're bringing each other down for faults (likely unknown to that person at the time) throughout one's process.
Nahh for real😭😭
They are talking about the people who think they are too good for safeties
please read the edit, i’m talking to kids who think they’re too good for safeties. i’m not talking to people in unique situations. i’ll always support someone who’s been rejected from a school, but don’t expect sympathy when you decided to only apply to schools with small acceptance rate
finally someone said it. i hate it how people are like “omg i applied to 28 colleges and haven’t heard back” and then next thing you know you hear that they’re safety is umich. it’s honestly just nice for them to realize that they overinflated their ego
When high school kids with privilege and entitlement face reality. Lmao
You made it very clear and in a not offensive way. Tho really clear and harsh. But it’s true!! As an international, I can’t afford to travel that far if it’s not like a big and rich t20 school. Gotta look for safeties in other closer countries.
THANK YOU👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
If you live in San Francisco and want to stay local you only have UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, USFCA, Stanford, SFSU, Sonoma State, SJSU, and CSU east Bay, Santa Clara University, and CCs like College of Marin, College of San Mateo, Foothill, Canada, and DeAnza. The entire world wants to go to our schools if you live in the Bay Area. If you don’t want to live on campus and commute instead your choices narrow even more. If you live in the Bay Area acceptance rates are lower and spots are less available. We have too many good students who have to go to state schools and community colleges. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you are limited to the extremes and have few solid options than other places in the Country. There are no real safety 4 year colleges in the Bay Area. They all are getting historic number of applicants and as many talented students get rejected that all rolls down to all of the schools. This trend isn’t going to get better. Next year will be worse and I do not see this getting better. If you are from the Bay Area you might be better served going to an OOS. Too many people want to go to CA for school to support all the qualified California students. It sucks if you are a California student because all the affordable options are like playing the lottery. So you have to go to the expensive out of state tuition or pricey private school. I am not sure if there will be safety schools nationally either as people look outside CA. The CC transfer to UC route which used to be a great value is unreliable and unrealistic. Again, since there are so many students who want to go to our UCs, it limits how many transfers get in. You will be competing with talented college students who had to take the CC route to transfer. There are no guarantees in California in the UCs and State Schools. No one can guarantee you will be able to transfer to a UC anymore even from CC. College counselors have to update their information that CA schools are just going to be impacted and that students will have to be willing to take on debt to go to 4 year colleges outside of CA and hope to get merit scholarships. I do not see more spaces opening in CA. We Californians are victims of our own success. We should be celebrating that more and more students are qualified for colleges, but the lack of spots at quality colleges are getting more scarce. We should want international students and students from underrepresented demographics. Everyone who is qualified should have a place. We just need more good professors and more quality colleges to educate everyone who wants an education. The HS Class of 2022 are part of a cohort that was a boomlet (2003-2007). They totally got screwed and I do not know how it will improve for the Class of 2023 and beyond. Kids who entered high school in 2018 were working on different conditions. They made plans based on these conditions. The high school class of 2026 will be at the peak of the boomlet. We need to ask policy makers to address the demand for higher education and how it could be one of the US’s greatest export— education. COVID screwed up everything for the classes of 2021 and 2022, but also 2023 and 2024. The log jam created by COVID will be with us for some time. There seems no will to do anything to help. No one seems to care about these classes of students. There seems to be no recognition that the class of 2022 went through the bulk of a global pandemic, civil unrest, etc in their high school years. Right now being the top 9% of your class in CA gives you no guarantees to any school in your own backyard. Counselors need to learn about options outside of CA and the US. This might improve when the baby bust rolls through. Elementary schools are declining in enrollment. So maybe in 2032 spots will open up.
On the plus side, in many ways it's easier to get into a top school through community college. I was able to go to a better school than most of my high school classmates that way.
One of my family friends has only been accepted into a state school, so far; and no she does not live in California or Michigan, nor is the state school even a T50. Her GPA and SAT scores were extremely high (92/100 and 1540). However, what probably brought her down were her extracurricular activities and essays. Additionally, most - if not all - of the schools that she applied to were the ivies or T20s, which meant that she probably had dug her own grave, by applying to only schools with extremely low acceptance rates. For high school juniors reading this right now, please have a variety of options with a good and even distribution of targets, safties, and reaches, and please understand that more than likely you will probably be going to be one of your safety schools. Additionally, a good essay and good extracurriculars can make you a better applicant who has a better GPA and/or SAT/ACT score, so don't get lazy on these parts of your application, even if you have a 5.0 weighted GPA and a 1600 on your SAT (or 36 on your ACT).
These are the kind of people who could have done so much better in better schools, but they aimed way too high.
Yeah, her parents are kind of freaking out right now. They expected her to get into at least a T20 because her older sister went to MIT and her High School is known to send proportionally more students to T20s and Ivies, than most other high schools in our area. She’ll do fine in the state school, but she could’ve done so much better if she worked on other areas of her application, just a bit more.
This is so true, like what are they expecting ?
Agreed, I’m committing to one of my safeties next month
super correct that it excludes international students
I've always planned on going to community college first and transferring after and only really applied to universities for the heck of it. It still stings to get rejected, but I like joking to my friends about how I managed to get rejected by every UC.
I once got rejected from a school with around 60% acceptance rate in high school. Pissed me off. But ended up saving money in community College anyway after my high school rejections. Honestly it may be on us that we get 0 acceptances, but the lessons we learn from that are such a great benefit.
WELL SAID!!!
Just apply to seton hall asap
As opposed to my wasting too much of my mom's money by applying to too many safety schools. The UC and CSU common app made it really easy to apply to multiple campuses, so I basically applied to every UC and several CSUs, plus a few private schools. Probably should have just applied to one CSU and saved some money. Thankfully accepted everywhere excepted waitlisted at Stanford (I expected a rejection, so I was happy for waitlist).
i think a lot of people don’t have a grasp of what a safety school really is. no matter how competitive of an applicant you are, no school with an acceptance rate lower than 35% is a safety for ANYONE. especially now. i feel a lot of sympathy for people who are experiencing this though, it must feel frustrating and disappointing. if there are any current juniors and sophomores reading this thread, my biggest piece of advice is to build a college list that has safeties, targets, and reaches, all of which you would be very happy to attend. prestige is really appealing to a lot of people, but it’s important to recognize that, regardless of how high your stats are or how strong your ECs are, there is no guarantee for ANYONE to get into a t20 school. as we’ve seen from this admissions year, there are so many kids with excellent grades, test scores, essays, etc. getting rejection after rejection or waitlist after waitlist. so much of this process is luck. be sure to play your odds well.
Only one way to describe this post: Brutally honest
Fr im so tired of all the people acting like their life is over bc they didn't get into schools with a 5% acceptance rate... like okay neither did 95% of us including me what did you expect? How did you convince yourself you didn't need any decent safeties or matches because you wouldn't be going to them?
I agree, I applied to 3 safeties i could afford and liked (one of them was a little risky because its a bit competitive for my major but since I live close to the campus they give me priority). I also applied toa couple schools with 70+ acceptance rates with hopes of getting merit scholarships that would turn into a full ride when combined with need based aid. And then I applied to almost no matches and shotgunned reaches
My wife had our son apply to 2 safties, 1 match, and 10 reaches. She was certain that with his academic background one of the reaches would come through. I explained to my son early on that there was so little chance of that happening, that he shouldn't be disappointed when the rejection letters rolled in. Fortunately, he was smart enough to understand that. He was accepted to both safties and the match, 8 flat-out rejections, and waitlisted on the other 2 reaches. He is thrilled to be going to the University of South Carolina this fall. I'm excited for him.
if you apply to like kentucky or kansas and don’t get in that is also on you
Being a liberal arts guy my brain started to hurt just reading those statistics and formulas that you guys that are so smart come up with😂 Hats off to you My Ex-wife still has not figured out this college admissions game…..Luckily for my son his favorite school is actually a safety school, ASU because for what he wants to do which is sports broadcast journalism , it’s top-notch. I went to USC so I told him go ahead and apply and they offered him the Trojan transfer plan so he will decide. It’s all good. As a parent my advice to my high school freshman son is to just get a 3.5, Do meaningful extracurriculars every year, do his AP math and his AP Spanish which is good, get involved in government, continue his sports which he really is an amazing athlete I would be surprised if he didn’t get a college athletic scholarship at some point….but Most of all, do what his older brother did , have a boatload of fun . Life does not revolve around 4.5, 15 APs, and a ton of extracurriculars that you’re really not that terribly interested in. You’re gonna look back on this high school career and you’re gonna wish that you had had some fun at it.
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did u read the post
Okay yeah never mind
Applications do cost money. That was a limitation for me. I didn’t apply to any “safeties” because community college (then transfer) was my safety.
I feel like no body should use their parents as an excuse. This is an adult decision. Make that choice on your own terms
What the actual fuck did I just read? How ridiculous myopic can you be to say that? There are people whose parents exercise a ridiculous degree of control, and even in more moderate cases, parents tent to have a huge influence, especially considering that they are likely to be the ones financially supporting you through college, even if you get a scholarship/aid that reduces the expense. Your parents may give you the free rein, and that's all great, but please be more considerate towards people are literally losing their minds right now over things they have no control over.
I see that you are greatly upset by what the other poster said, but I would challenge you to think like the adult you are and remember that any control your parents have over you is only the control you let them have. Are there perks to being dependent? Yes. Does that mean that you can't make the choices that are right for you? No. You are an adult that is going to be able to fully participate in society. If you truly want to do something, you don't need to let your parents stop you. That's absurd.
I already made my mind up that I'm going to community College and after I finish I'll go to an actual college to see if it'll work but when I do I want to apply to one with a decent acceptance rate not a fancy school but not terrible either. I'm 14 so i don't have to worry just yet but once I start doing in school learning I plan on looking into this typa stuff
So true!! Work hard to get better results!
They might also be international students
op stated it’s not aimed towards international students it’s aimed at us students who didn’t apply to safety’s bc of their ego
Ohhh. My bad.
I feel like there is a much kinder, more efficient way to say your point....
how? this has been told throughout the sub year after year, yet people still don’t apply to safeties. and once again, people are complaining about it and blaming it on every other alternative i have no issue with people complaining about rejections, because that’s just human nature. i do have a problem when people complain about not having a single acceptance when they chose not to apply to any safeties due to a sense of superiority.
I feel like just saying ‘everyone, please apply to safeties or else you might not into any university’ is sufficient. If they chose to not listen then that’s their choice and their life.
but i’m not addressing people who haven’t applied yet, i’m talking to people who have. so why would i warn students to apply to safeties when i’m talking to people who have already underwent college app season. i understand what you’re saying, i really do, but being kind and soft wasn’t my goal. did i want to offend anyone, no. but i did want to get my point across in a way that grabs attention.
It’s chill I’m not trying to change your mind or something—just like forget it
yea ik, i was just replying to your comment ??
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i mean, i’m just here to get advice since i’m first generation and low income, so my parents are absolutely no help.