Safety schools for a high stats kid?
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Anonymous
| Are there T50 schools that are highly likely to accept a high stats FCPS kid? If your kid is high stats what safety schools did you apply to? |
Anonymous
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This boils down to how one defines a safety.
My opinion, for a high stats kid, the acceptance rate would need to be >50%. There are no true safeties in the top 50. Even those just beyond top 50 that may be prone to yield protection. I'd be looking top 70+ |
Anonymous
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Please do a search. There is a long thread about this from a couple of weeks ago.
That said, given COVID and test-optional, there are basically no "top50" schools that are safeties for high stats kids. Look at your in-state options and state flagships that aren't Michigan, UCLA, Cal, Texas, Wisconsin and UNC. |
Anonymous
| How about William and Mary, in state? Is it a safety |
Anonymous
| Who cares about whether a school is ranked overall at #21-50?? It's not a top school. I'd look at top schools in kid's major. And apply to high acceptance rate state schools as safety schools. |
Anonymous
| Wisconsin |
Anonymous
No, with an acceptance rate is in the 30s, W&M is not a safety. |
Anonymous
| Lehigh |
Anonymous
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In VA, for a high stats kid, I’d say VT non-engineering and JMU are safeties. In MD, UMD-CP.
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Anonymous
For my high stats kid, UMBC was the safety. College Park is not really a safety for anyone. |
Anonymous
UMD CP is the flagship. Not a safety. Perhaps it’s not as highly ranked as UVA, etc but there are tons of high stats kids applying. My son has high stats but he has plenty of other schools he is applying to because we have known kids who experienced surprise rejections. Our issue is the $$ so he needs to find a backup in-state in case his other backups don’t provide enough merit aid. He is struggling with finding a good fit in state. For most kids aiming for UMD CP, it’s UMBC as it’s stronger than others. I wish we had as many options as VA. |
Anonymous
If you’re talking about a kid with an unweighted GPA over 3.8, plenty of AP classes, weak activities and SATs of about 1450 or higher classes and you have plenty of money: - Your state flagship, for arts and sciences. - A respectable out-of-state state flagship that’s easy to get into, for arts and sciences. (Example: the University of Delaware.) - A school equivalent to George Mason or a Cal State something of other if you’re in a state with ultra selective top-tier state schools. - A mid-tier liberal arts school. (Examples: Denison; Juniata. But make sure schools like that don’t reject a lot of high-stats kids who seem to be using them as safeties.) If you’re the parent of a kid like that and in the donut hole, and your budget is something like $10,000 to $20,000 per year: - Add a couple of weak but solvent liberal arts colleges where your kid would be one of the best students and very likely get a lot of merit aid; - Add a community college that has a good program for funneling good students into good state flagships or other good four-year colleges; and/or - Consider adding a cheap English-language bachelor’s program in some place like Southern Europe, if you have an extremely brave, independent kid who’s desperate to go to a challenging, interesting program out of state and horrified by going to a weak liberal college or a community college. If you’re fairly high-income but your budget is under, $10,000, community college or treating weak liberal arts colleges as if they were Harvard and begging them for merit aid might be the only options. If you’re low-income, see if lower-tier public universities in your state have good merit aid for kids like your kid. If you can afford to pay $20,000 to $30,000 per year, and your kid has good scores on three or more AP tests, maybe you can use English-language bachelor’s programs in France, Spain or the Netherlands for daredevil kids who are horrified by the idea of going to community college. If other people now say there’s no guarantee the European bachelor’s will be worth much in the United States: This could be true. Your kid should think about that. But, on the other hand, if I were a National Merit Semifinalist with straight A’s and being told to go to community college, in a state where that’s not common, I’d rather run away to university in Bulgaria than go to community college with the illiterate stoners from my high school. |
Anonymous
Maybe for an in-state kid with straight A’s and over 1560 on the SATs who doesn’t need aid other than student loans. |
Anonymous
in most states, the state flagship IS a safety for high stats kids. Virginia and a handful of other states are exceptions to this. I get your point about UMD-CP, but in my kids’ anecdotal experience at a MoCo HS, probably 1/4-1/3 of the class gets admitted and certainly all of the high stats kids, although to your point there is occasionally an outlier (and those outliers usually applied after Nov 1). |
Anonymous
Is it easy to get in from oos? |